Pay-Per-Click Fundamentals: How to Learn PPC on Adwords

How to Learn PPC

Learning how to use Google AdWords to do Pay-Per-Click marketing can be an extremely difficult proposition. Particularly if you aren't actively working for an agency or on an internal team of a business that is already using AdWords, there aren't many opportunities to learn from others and get hands on experience.

A Reddit user wanted to know the best way to work around this issue, asking: "How do you get started with Google AdWords and master the platform so that you are sure to create optimized campaigns that put your money to good use?" Surprisingly, there are a lot of relatively simple ways to get started with Google AdWords without ever spending a dime. In the video above, I cover some of my own experiences in learning AdWords and also some of the fundamental learning tools that anyone can put to use for themselves when they are trying to learn how to best use AdWords.

Below are links to some of the resources that I mentioned in the video that are great places to get started learning the basics. They will give you a good foundation to build upon when learning how to use the platform.

To view more of our videos answering questions from around the web and for more information about video marketing, you can check out our other work here. If you have a question that you would like answered, leave it in the comments section below or tweet it at us at @BFMweb.

Video Transcript

Hey, I’m Dan Morosi from Blue Fountain Media. I’m a Senior Marketing Specialist and I oversee the tactical implementation and maintenance and optimization of all of our paid media, paid search and display efforts. We got a question from Reddit, it said: “What is the best way to go about learning PPC?”

I guess I’ll start with how I went about learning PPC. I had a marketing background already - I was working at a really small agency – really holistic, all inclusive, a lot of radio, tv, print and then our clients kept asking about a thing which I really didn’t have any background in at all with, which was just Google AdWords and PPC in general.

So, it kind of became my job to learn how to do that, and I was a little bit clueless, but the first thing I did (and something I hope you’ve done so far) is I googled: “Learn AdWords.” And then I skipped right past the paid search links down to that first organic line, which was a support article from Google and I watched every video they had. I went through their entire program, I learned all that stuff, and one of the things that didn’t make any sense was how it actually related to the actual usage of the product. That’s when I went and logged in and made an AdWords account, which I had done from the outset. But, I used all the information they had to help me set up the campaigns in Adwords.

Moving forward, I was doing a halfway decent job but there was a lot of things that I just didn’t understand about it. I had an understanding of the idea that we have to target our audience, we have to take them to the right part of the website and things like that, but there were a lot of holes in my knowledge. So, we ended up taking on a mentor, a person in another agency who had an interest in a co-opportunity with us and he taught me an amazing amount of things about AdWords, and they were all just completely wrong. He was just terrible at his job as it turns out – but, I learned a lot of things about how to not do paid search through him.

I was able to sort of correct all those things, reading blogs like Search Engine Land and just scouring the internet for these details and what ended up happening eventually is I ended up moving cities and went to New York and ended up getting a job at a exclusively digital agency, where I was part of a larger paid search team and I got a lot of benefit from their years of expertise and knowledge about the product. Truthfully, from my own experience, you can learn from those articles, you can learn from blogs and all those things but nothing will ever substitute just working in AdWords. There’s just information you can get just by viewing the numbers on a daily and weekly basis that you can’t get anywhere else.

One of the things that the person on Reddit mentioned is that they are trying to get a job at a place sort of like Blue Fountain Media, and they’re trying to break into the scene but they don’t have any way of learning how to do it without access to money to pay for the account. I don’t think this is as big of a problem as you might think it is. When I was at my first exclusively digital agency, we were taking on new members all the time and we would hire people who knew basically nothing about AdWords – they just had a background in advertising or a background in marketing, but more important they had an amazing thirst to learn about it. We hired a girl who had zero background in Adwords zero background really in digital marketing at all, but she came in and she said, “I just want to learn how to do it.” We took her over dozens of applicants who had much more experience with it, but they didn’t have the same zest or desire to learn how to do it.

So, I wouldn’t sell yourself short, you certainly have an opportunity – there are plenty of agencies that are hiring that way. You can start at more of an intern level or at the associate level, but get your background from general articles on the internet and from Google – you can even get certified having never even run an account by Google and that’s how I’d start.

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About the Author

Dan Morosi

Before joining Blue Fountain Media, Dan refined his skills in online marketing at HeBS Digital, a boutique firm specializing in the Hospitality industry. He now uses his marketing savvy to transform and grow the presence of clients in an ever-changing online marketplace.